During the post-crisis period from 2009 to 2015, in a situation where there was low economic growth, a significant proportion of the growth of salaried employment in commercial sectors came from medium size companies.

Although legal units with less than 10 employees created a net 100,000 jobs over the period, micro-businesses lost almost as much. The organisation of smaller legal units into groups explains this apparent contradiction: job-creating legal units with fewer than 10 employees often belong to groups and are not micro-businesses. The remaining 1.4 million legal units did not overall create any jobs. Others grew and were no longer micro-businesses in 2015. They constitute an important incubator that feeds the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which themselves contribute greatly to the growth of medium size companies. Finally, larger companies lost jobs over that period.